Msg to Institutional Dems:

Thanks, babylonsister! (Click on the image to enlarge.)

US Feds Ordered "Assassination City" Police to STOP Screening for Weapons at Obama Rally

Per The Fort Worth Star Telegram, "[s]ecurity details at Barack Obama's rally [in Dallas, Texas] Wednesday stopped screening people for weapons at the front gates more than an hour before the Democratic presidential candidate took the stage at Reunion Arena.

"The order to put down the metal detectors and stop checking purses and laptop bags came as a surprise to several Dallas police officers who said they believed it was a lapse in security.

* * *

"Several Dallas police officers said it worried them that the arena was packed with people who got in without even a cursory inspection.

"They spoke on condition of anonymity because, they said, the order was made by federal officials who were in charge of security at the event."

You can't even get into the Dallas Museum of Art without having your bag inspected.

Hunter S. Thompson, Richard Nixon, Noam Chomsky, Etc.

— all this and more is yours on DU.

"'The trail of Richard Nixon, if it happens, will amount to a de facto trial of the American Dream. . . . The real question is why we are forced to impeach a president elected by the largest margin in the history of presidential elections . . . . The necessity of actually bringing Nixon to trial, in order to understand our reality in the same way the Nuremberg trials forced Germany to confront itself . . . .' Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Washington: The Boys in the Bag, 1974, The Great Shark Hunt.

"The old fashioned American way of dealing with problems like Richard Nixon was to sweep them under the rug. Kick him out of office in disgrace, arrange a pardon so that his actual crimes — and especially the identities of his coconspirators in high places, such as the business community — could never be revealed. Ensure that the mechanisms that he used to steal power are left in place so that the same methods can be used again, as Noam Chomsky so presciently noted in 1973:

“'But the conditions that permitted the rise of McCarthy and Nixon endure. Fortunately for us and for the world, McCarthy was a mere thug and Nixon's mafia overstepped the bounds of acceptable trickery and deceit with such obtuseness and blundering vulgarity that they were called to account by powerful forces that had not [yet] been demolished or absorbed. But sooner or later, under the threat of political or economic crisis, some comparable figure may succeed in creating a mass political base, bringing together socioeconomic forces with the power and the finesse to carry out plans such as those that were conceived in the Oval Office. Only perhaps he will choose his domestic enemies more judiciously and prepare the ground more thoroughly.' Noam Chomsky, 'Watergate: A Skeptical View,' The New York Review of Books, September 20, 1973.'"

Murakami Snarfs Up Bombed Billboard

Details here.

Cao Fei’s "iMirror"

. . . a documentary “filmed” entirely in Second Life and directed by her SL avatar China Tracy. Including some slightly hilarious avatar disco dancing and rather long credits at the end, Part 3, below, is 9:28 min.



Part 1 opens with a great quote from William J. Mitchell's Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City: "I construct, and I am constructed, in a mutually recursive process that continually engages my fluid, permeable boundaries and my endlessly ramifying networks. I am a spatially extended cyborg."

More iMirror: Part 1, Part 2.

Info re- current exhibits of Fei's work at Artkrush, which quotes Fei, "[i]n the end, I think this 3-D world is the future world." Which 3-D world?

Body Worlds UPDATE

Re- my previous post . . . The Times reports that Gunther von Hagens, "sometimes dubbed Dr. Death," plans to put some 150,000 plastinated body parts on sale to the public.

"Dr. von Hagens says that he will not sell the body parts if it damages the dignity of the corpse.

"'That means forbidding the use of the body sections as, for example, placemats for cocktail glasses,' he says, 'and if the owner wants to get rid of the body bits he will be required to cremate them and not simply throw them in the bin.'

". . . . so far he has been promised 8,568 corpses and has 531 in stock, all swimming in baths of alcohol awaiting his chemical treatment" -- in addition to the hundreds already plastinated and in touring exhibits?

Suck My Fish Cakes

What got me about this story is, "[t]he cost of the meal came to £284.68, including a 10% service charge." Per the first currency converter that popped up, that's $554.23, so the server's tip was automatically ca. $55.42.

Whistle-Blowers' Site Taken Off-Line in the U.S.

. . . that is, the eminently useful Wikileaks. As reported by the BBC, the site, which "allows whistle blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents[,] has been taken offline in the US.

* * *

"The site was founded in 2006 by dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and technologists from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.

"It so far claims to have published more than 1.2 million documents."

Versions of the site hosted in other countries such as Belgium and India can supposedly still be accessed.

P.S.: Note to journalists: it's ok to have more than one sentence per paragraph.

UPDATE Feb. 29, 2008: Per the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the order that disabled the wikileaks.org domain name in the U.S. has, for now, been rescinded. EFF attorney Matt Zimmerman said, "[a]ttempting to interfere with the operation of an entire website because you have a dispute over some of its content is never the right approach. Disabling access to an Internet domain in an effort to prevent the world from accessing a handful of widely-discussed documents is not only unconstitutional -- it simply won't work." The ACLU has also intervened. Consider donating.